ABSTRACT
The advent of the middle-class ascendancy has been slow in coming. It has taken millennia for the middling orders to become the dominant social stratum. Nowadays we are in the midst of a Middle-Class Revolution. For the first time in history, members of the middle stratum are numerically and socially dominant. Today it is they who set the overarching social agenda. It is also they who have become the custodians of our community’s core values. Where once the upper classes were the final arbiters of fashion and social policy, they have been displaced, not individually, but collectively. Individual members of the upper classes continue to exercise more clout than those who occupy the middle ground, yet as a group they too follow patterns established by their ostensible inferiors. Denizens of the middle classes have, in fact, become society’s designated planners and managers. They are the ones who determine the most important social objectives and then organize their achievement. It is they who keep the factories humming, design our highway systems, mediate social disputes through legal means, care for our health, gratify our aesthetic needs, and manage the nuts and bolts of our financial institutions.
